52 Ë The Russo-Japanese War
about Russia. Natives, much above the rank of the middle class in Japan, as well as coolies and
common women, have been systematically sent out to gather information, and make reports to
the Mikado’s Government.... O cers of the Japanese army and navy have thought it no shame
to pass as barbers, cheap-jacks, photographers, and what not, in order to be enabled to spy out
important and State secrets.... They [the Japanese] know as much about Wei-hei-Wei and Hong-
Kong as our own authorities, and of San Francisco and the Philippines as the Americans.”¹³⁸After all, in the view of Westerners, Japan was a country ofninjas. Years later, a Ger-
man report noted likewise: “[T]his preoccupation with espionage is ingrained in the
Japanese, since for very many years under the shogunate a system of secret police was
extensively active whose main task was to secure the shoguns against plots on their
lives and against their positions.”¹³⁹
It is possible that in 1904-05, Japan “subjected Russia, not only in Asia but in Eu-
rope as well, to invasion by the largest secret army ever put into the eld up to this
time.”¹⁴⁰A British military observer subsequently noted that “in the course of his-
tory, there have been few wars in which espionage was so widely practiced as during
the Manchurian campaign.”¹⁴¹A Soviet commentator observed similarly: “Never in
the history of war was espionage used so extensively as in the Russo-Japanese war of
1904–1905.”¹⁴²Before the war between Russia and Japan began, even the British mili-
tary attaché in Beijing, “with the help ofthe Japanese who have agents at every railway
station in Manchuria, ha[d] just completed an accurate summary of all the Russian
troops from Lake Baikal eastwards.”¹⁴³
This image of an army of Japanese spies became entrenched in the minds of Rus-
sians and later continued to in uence the Soviet government. However far the dis-
tance of the Caucasus from Japan, Moscow never failed to see there the shadow of its
Far Eastern foe.
138 Bennet Burleigh [war correspondent ofLondon Daily Telegraph],Empire of the East or Japan and
Russia at War, 1904–5(London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), 72–73.
139 Quoted in Ronald Seth,Secret Servants: A History of Japanese Espionage(New York: Farrar, Straus
and Cudahy, 1957), 151.
140 Speth,Secret Servants, 144.
141 Quoted in David Wolf, “Intelligence Intermediaries: The Competition for Chinese Spies,” in Stein-
berg et al.,The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, vol. 1, 305.
142 Votinov,Iaponskii shpionazh, 4.
143 Quoted in Ian Nish, “Japanese Intelligence and the Approach of the Russo-Japanese War,” in An-
drew and Dilks,The Missing Dimension, 30 (emphasis in original).